On Thursday, June 30th, 2016, at 10:30 am, the Georgia Green Party will host a brief press conference in the breezeway at the entrance to the Sloppy Floyd State Office Building, 2 MLK Blvd; Atlanta Georgia. Following brief remarks by Dr. Jill Stein, presumptive Presidential nominee of the Green Party of the United States, and members of the Georgia Party’s slate for Electoral College, Party officers will proceed inside to file qualifying papers for the slate.

“Thursday’s filing is only the first. In two weeks time, we file the petitions collected with the help of Georgians ready to make history. The Georgia Green Party intends to take full advantage of the historic voting rights decision of March 17. We are bending all our efforts to get these signatures and become the first political party in living memory on the Georgia ballot not run by the billionaires,” said Bruce Dixon, CoChair of the Georgia Green Party. Dixon along with Fulton County Party activist Dawn Gibson are providing the day-to-day managment of the Party’s petition drive, which faces a Tuesday, July 12th, 12:00 noon deadline.

Last week the Stein campaign announced it had secured the delegates to win the Party’s nomination on the first ballot. A CNN poll found that 7% of likely voters support the Stein candidacy, even though only 17% of voters understand that she is in the race.

According to the state election code, the Party must file close to 52 thousand signatures to secure a ballot line for their state-wide candidates, including Stein and the Electoral College slate. However that statute was overturned earlier this year as unconstitutional and Federal District Court Judge Richard Story’s order imposed as an interim remedy a signature barrier of 7,500 signatures. The Party has been engaged in a campaign to collect those signatures and has been contracting with Party activists to that end. With only two weeks left, the Party still has openings on its petitioning crew.

Among the candidates qualifying Thursday for the Electoral College seats is Dawson County resident Meg Norris. Ms. Norris is a mother, teacher, founder and the state-wide coordinator of Opt-Out Georgia. She has travelled the state urging parents to opt their children out of the high stakes standardized tests being used to justify the closure of locally controlled schools, the termination of their staffs and the transfer of their assets, revenues and student bodies to privatized, for-profit schools.

The Georgia Green Party at its 2015 state convention adopted an amendment to its Platform, stating its opposition to the ‘Georgia State Intervention in Failing Public Schools Amendment’, also called the Opportunity School District, a constitutional amendment placed on the November ballot by the state assembly, providing the Governor the power to shut down public schools and turn them over for the profit of private operators.

Stein delivered the keynote address at the National Opt Out conference in February and the Georgia Greens are the only political party unequivocally opposed to Governor Deal’s cynically misnamed “opportunity school district” amendment on the November ballot.

“OSD signals the beginning of the end of public education. The privitization train is running out of control through Georgia and parents must own this struggle in the name of our children,” said Ms. Norris. “The strongest tool we have as parents, besides our voices, is our right to refuse the very tests Governor Deal is using to destroy our schools. We must opt out of standardized testing designed to fail our children, our teachers and our schools.”